Public policy
Refugee appeals – the luck of the draw
With their permanent residency settled, the Nadesalingams (the “Biloela Family”) can finally find peace after ten years of uncertainty and harassment – harassment that was never justifiable on moral grounds, for what code of morality endorses the use of cruelty on innocent people in order to emphasize an aspect of public policy?
Along the way Priya Nadesalingam lodged an appeal against deportation with the Administrative Appeals Tribunal, but it was dismissed. That’s the usual outcome.
Three members of the Kaldor Centre for International Refugee Law at the University of New South Wales have looked at the success or otherwise of more than 18 613 applications for review of refugee cases considered by the Administrative Appeals Tribunal, and at subsequent appeals of unsuccessful cases to the Federal Circuit and Family Courts.
In brief, they find that in both the AAT and the courts the outcome depends on who hears the case.
You can find data on AAT decisions and a paper on court outcomes at the Kaldor Centre Data Lab. The ABC’s Daniel Ghezelbash and Keyvan Dorostkar, of the Law Report, have done us the favour of analysing the figures and presenting the outcomes in graphical form (without disclosing the names of judges, which are disclosed in the datasets). Or you can hear about the Kaldor Centre’s work in the Law Report, in a 28-minute interview with Ghezelbash.
The AAT data shows a huge variation in success rates, from 0 to 89 percent. At first sight that suggests the AAT has a range of tough and lenient members: that may be the case, but tribunal members tend to specialize in cases from particular countries. Different success rates are to be expected. Even within members who specialize in particular countries, there is significant variation, however. In particular the data reveals that one was more likely to get a favourable decision from a tribunal member appointed by a Labor government than one appointed by a Coalition government.
When it comes to court decisions, there is no specialization, because cases are assigned randomly. Again there is high variation. Unsurprisingly, those who were represented by a lawyer had far more success. Women tended to rule in favour of the applicants more often than men.
This suggests that at least some judges and tribunal members are biased in their decisions. They may also be inconsistent in their decisions: the distinction between bias and consistency is important: see the work of Daniel Kahneman Noise: a flaw in human judgement, “noise” being the statisticians’ term for inconsistency. We know, at least, that a judge who never lets a case succeed is consistent, but he or she is probably biased. As another example we can correctly say that the politicized courts in some countries with authoritarian governments are biased against the appellants, but they are generally consistent in their harshness.
The Kaldor Centre’s data reveals that as a system, we can be fairly sure that Australia’s refugee appeal process is inconsistent, and it may be biased, but we don’t know whether those individual judges’ and members’ biases cancel out. To a lawyer concerned for his or her own success rate, courts’ inconsistency may be accepted as a fact of life – “you win some, you lose some”. Inconsistency is an intolerable situation for a refugee seeking a determination, who has only one or two shots at an appeal.
These findings are in the wider context of inconsistency and possible bias in our legal system, addressed in an Australian Law Reform Commission report Without fear or favour: judicial impartiality and the law on bias, completed late last year, tabled in the Senate this month, and under consideration by the Attorney General.
The long haul from Sydney to Melbourne: There’s a track, winding back …
“There are no cities in the world as close to each other with such large population as Sydney and Melbourne which are linked by so bad a railway.”
Gough Whitlam said that 31 years ago and it is still the case, Philip Laird writes in The Conversation: More than ever, it’s time to upgrade the Sydney–Melbourne railway.
He describes needs identified over the years, including calls for a European-style high-speed-rail, and suggests that at least the line could be strengthened and re-aligned with about 200 km of new track to take trains travelling at between 160 and 250 kph. (The old line is designed for steam locomotives, with gentle gradients and sharp curves.) Instead of any major upgrade, all that’s been happening is a set of limited works aimed at keeping the line open.
The case Laird presents stands on conventional transport economics that takes into account travel times, per-kilometre costs, and safety, for passenger and freight transport. The case also passes in relation to climate change, particularly in view of the need to reduce emissions from aviation.
There was a time when aviation was the great time saver over rail. In view of the unreliability of our airlines, the congestion in Melbourne and Sydney airports, the congestion on those same cities’ freeways, a four-hour or even five-hour train trip from Sydney ‘s CBD to Melbourne’s CBD would represent a significant time saver.
Gas-guzzling cars: we’re worse than Americans
Australia has been lax in requiring cars and trucks to meet fuel efficiency standards. New cars sold in Australia emit 170 grams of carbon dioxide per kilometre, compared with 130 grams in the US, 120 grams in the EU, and 115 in Japan.
The Australia Institute has issued a paper – Fuelling efficiency – urging the government to live up to a promise the Labor Party made while in opposition, to implement mandatory fuel efficiency standards, rather than relying on the industry’s voluntary standards. They list attempts to improve standards going back to 2008. “However, progress towards introducing standards in Australia has been hampered by politicisation of electric vehicles, industry lobbying, misinformation about the impact of standards, and delayed government action.”
Electric cars don't have these
That politicisation and misinformation has involved hysterical claims by the Morrison government about higher costs of cars and the existential threats more rigorous standards would pose to the tradies’ beloved Toyota Hilux.
While we had a car industry our failure to implement standards was a backdoor form of assistance to our industry, in a way to get around WTO rules. But even though we no longer have a car manufacturing industry, we have a large car distribution, sales, and maintenance industry, and some commercial vehicle manufacturing. Writing in The Sydney Morning Herald, Ben Cubby reveals that our car industry, represented by the Federal Chamber of Automotive Industries, has a secret emissions plan designed to slow the uptake of electric vehicles. That plan is essentially an extension of our existing voluntary standards.
More stringent and mandatory standards would indeed raise the price of new gasoline-powered cars, but not by the ridiculous levels Scott Morrison was throwing around. That price rise would be around $1000 to $2000, and would be easily recouped by better fuel efficiency. But as the price of electric vehicles comes down, that $1000 to $2000 represents a competitive disadvantage for gasoline-powered cars.
Australian lobby groups are behaving in a disappointingly familiar fashion – a reaction against any change that disrupts current arrangements – even though the transition to electric vehicles provides tremendous business opportunities. In part this reflects the long history of private sector lobbies in Australia, which have always found better returns in pressing governments for protection or special regulation than in adjusting to change. And in part it reflects a fundamental problem of so-called “industry” lobby groups, which represent established existing players in the industry, but not the startups and newcomers who may find opportunities in a less protected industry. (The same applies to some trade unions, whose accountability is to their existing members.)
The Reserve Bank explains its reasoning – well, sort of
If you were to plod through the Reserve Bank’s Statement on Monetary Policy, you would get the impression that Australia is facing such a contraction in spending that further interest rate rises should be entirely out of the question. Pre-election and Covid-related public spending will be unwound, already-implemented interest rate increases will reduce private income, and falling real estate market values will result in a “wealth effect” – people’s irrational but real reaction to falling asset values manifest in a reduction in consumption.
A point missed by most media is that not only has the RBA revised its own economic growth forecasts downwards, but it also forecasts much lower growth rates than Treasury provided for Chalmers’ recent statement on the economy. For 2022-2023 and 2023-24 Treasury forecasts growth of 3.00 and 2.00 percent respectively, while the RBA forecasts growth of 2.25 percent and 1.75 percent. That’s a very significant difference for this year.
The RBA stresses that its concern is with inflation, including once-off price rises, such as the rise in gas and electricity prices resulting from the Ukraine war, and the end of the fuel excise reduction on September 28. As with economic growth, its inflation forecast is pessimistic: it’s substantially higher than Treasury’s. Somehow the world looks very different from Martin Place than it does from King Edward Terrace.
Also the RBA expects there to be some significant rises in nominal wages, particularly as people shift jobs in search of higher-paid employment. (These rises won’t be manifest in indices of wage costs, which assume a constant composition of occupation.) Wage rises won’t be across the board however, and will still be below inflation for some time to come.
The RBA isn’t so rash as to make firm interest rate predictions: it’s in enough trouble for having promised not to raise interest rates until 2024. But it is expecting the cash rate to rise: “Market pricing implies that the cash rate is expected to reach around three per cent by December [2022] and a peak of around three and a quarter per cent in early 2023”. Further on, however, it says that the cash rate is expected to have “declined a little by the end of 2024”.
One may ask why it thinks it may be necessary to raise rates only to have them fall again. Are they behaving like the rookie pilot who tries to over-control the plane, rather than making small moves on the control stick and waiting for the response?
If you can read this, thank a teacher
Covid-19 has brought to our attention the stress under which schools are operating.
On last week’s Saturday Extra, Geraldine Doogue interviewed Mark Grant of the Australian Institute for Teaching and School Learning, on the stresses faced by teachers and on schools trying to keep classes operating: Teacher shortages: schools at breaking point.
Milparinka schoolhouse
If we were expecting one simple explanation for these stresses, Grant didn’t provide it. There have never been so many combined factors contributing to our present problems – an ageing workforce, an undersupply of teaching graduates, the diminished status of teaching, financially attractive employment in other jobs, and Covid-19.
Salary has been a consistent problem for all teachers, and there is no significant pay premium for the most accomplished and able teachers. The administrative burden is cumbersome – ”sucking the passion out of teaching and learning”.
Then there is a supply problem. We have 47 tertiary education institutions providing teaching courses, but there is no agency able to provide these institutions with demand forecasts so that universities have the lead times to provide courses. Grant mentions AITSL’s submission to the Productivity Commission’s Review of the National School Reform Agreement, which goes into the details of the problem of matching workforce supply and demand.
There may be many people wanting to make a mid-career shift and become teachers, but it would take two years out of the workforce to gain qualifications, unless one can find paid internships.
The 11-minute interview is about immediate problems. The broad context of our problems is an economic structure that has left the public sector underfunded and devalued, and the stress is being felt most keenly in labour-intensive services where public sector pay is severely lagging behind private sector pay for similar or less demanding work. There is something very wrong when a math teacher, providing a vital service for young people who will soon enter the workforce, can get a much higher pay in the finance sector, shuffling money around and doing little, if anything, of value for human welfare. Or when a gifted classroom teacher can get a job with a consultancy firm peddling the bullshit of managerial training.
If this website is slow to download, blame Tony Abbott
OK – this website is probably working because it’s written in plain vanilla HTML. But if your work requires manipulating large databases in the cloud, handling multi-gigabyte images for astronomy or medical research, working with a distant colleague on engineering drawings, or frequent meetings with colleagues in remote places, you need a fast, reliable connection. And if you’re working from home, with a spouse who is also working from home, while one child is doing homework and another is playing a graphics-intensive game, you will know the dismal arithmetic of sharing a connection.
Late last year Albanese said that Australia has slipped to 59th place in average broadband speeds, a claim verified by the RMIT-ABC fact checkers. Among countries with higher speeds are many countries with much lower incomes than Australia’s – Italy, the UK, China, Russia, Vietnam. Our median speed is around 50 Mbps, while most “developed” countries have speeds of 100 Mbps and higher.
On last weekend’s Saturday Extra Geraldine Doogue interviewed Paul Budde, who has advised governments around the world on broadband policy, and who was adviser on policy and strategy for our original fibre-to-the-premises national broadband network: NBN Reset.
We know that even though the then Communications Minister Malcolm Turnbull was enthusiastic about the NBN, the Abbott government scaled back the plan to a fibre-to-the-node model. Ostensibly the idea was to save money (which it didn’t): more likely it reflected Abbott’s deep suspicion of new communication technologies, and a fear that new communication channels would upset his government’s cosy arrangements with its supporters in established media.
Budde draws our attention to a major policy shift by the new government. The plan to privatize the NBN has been put on hold, and the NBN is relieved of the requirement to devote its profit to pay down debt quickly. Even the present network could provide higher speeds for most users, but its pricing structure, designed to maximize profits, requires the NBN to charge prices for high-speed services that are unaffordable for most users. Without that requirement the NBN will have the financial freedom to upgrade the network to its originally-intended standards, and to reduce prices for customers.
Barbarians at the gate: the threats to liberal education
The announcement by Federation University that it intended to axe its Bachelor of Arts program has brought forth condemnation from academics around Australia. The decision by the Morrison government – no friend of learning and particularly hostile to liberal education – to double fees for humanities has almost certainly contributed to the university’s decision.
Simon During, Professor of Culture and Communication at the University of Melbourne, writes in The Conversation about the demoralisation of the humanities, and suggests what can be done about it.
It hasn’t always been this way, he reminds us:
With the rise of political democracy in the late 19th century, the ruling class came to believe that the population needed to be educated in the humanities to exercise their power responsibly. People needed to develop their capacity for critical reflection and analysis, their appreciation of the hallowed cultural heritage, and their civic virtue. That way, so it was thought, democracy, now in the hands of the working class, would not descend into populist chaos.
But that idea has given way to the cult of “neoliberal managerialism, with its loyalty to market forces rather than to values, traditions, ideas and people”. Universities have become commercial entities, and their performance is assessed by metrics such as graduates’ starting salaries.
During outlines the path taken by the humanities since the rise of managerialism. He describes how in many universities the humanities have managed an accommodation with neoliberalism, by providing an immediately “relevant” interpretation of events, and rejecting a narrative written by dead white males. The ideology is of the “left”, but it is in the broad neoliberal framework of commodification of learning, lacking depth and substance.
He advocates a “left conservative” path for the humanities:
We need to be able more firmly to connect the traditional humanities to post-sixties progressivism’s intellectual, moral and political advances. We need to develop the new progressive worldview, which does not accept the global dominance of a white, European, carbon-emitting, patriarchal oligarchy. At the same time, we must uphold the old disciplines and their protocols and canons, despite their having been mainly established by elite, Eurocentric, white men.
A similar theme, focussing on the importance of history, is taken up on Late Night Live by Carolyn Holbrook, Frank Bongiorno and Yves Rees, contributors to the recently-published book Lessons from History. In their half-hour session – Can historians help us tackle our big policy challenges?—they discuss the relevance of history to public policy. Politicians often choose historical analogies to justify policy lines – a favourite right now is the 1938 München “appeasement”. And there is always the interpretation, and re-interpretation, of the Anzac story. They suggest we strengthen our democratic institutions in Australia by developing the story – the history – of the growth and development of democracy in Australia.
Workers’ rights
By what criteria are the following countries – Bangladesh, Belarus, Brazil, Colombia, Egypt, Eswatini (Swaziland), The Philippines, Guatemala, Myanmar, Turkey – classified at the bottom of world rankings?
According to the International Trade Union Confederation’s 2022 Global Rights Index, they’re the ten worst countries for working people out of 148 countries surveyed. (Some of them are also sources of our clothing and locations of call centres we use.)
The general trend, particularly since around 2015, has been for the situation for working people to deteriorate.
The most commonly reported violation of workers’ rights is the criminalization of strike action in 87 percent of the countries on which the TUC reports, followed by restrictions on collective bargaining (79 percent of countries). Just behind, and catching up quickly, are restrictions on the right to unionize.
Australia comes in for mention, specifically in relation to QUBE Fremantle Container Terminals and Patrick Terminals.
Writing in Social Europe Sharan Burrow summarizes the report, and describes How to restore workers’ rights. The world has a set of basic labour standards, laid down by the International Labour Organization. National governments and companies, at a minimum, should abide by and enforce these standards, and should ensure that companies that respect workers’ rights are not undercut by less ethical operators. (Yes, it is the same Sharan Burrow who was president of the ACTU. She is now the General Secretary of the International Trade Union Confederation.)